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Meet the Ungulorns
above:'' the ungulorns are some of the most derived of all griffons, or quadruped birds, on Pluvimundus. Adapted ancestrally to a running, terrestrial lifestyle, today they fill a wide variety of niches and forms from cursorial grazer to stocky omnivore to pursuit predator to semi-aquatic herbivore. Pictured above, clockwise from left, are the painted hippogriff (Hippogriffus pictus), paddamime quarbird'', (Rostrognathus paddamimus), jungle scarnabou, (Necorhynchus sylvaticus),'' and bluebilled duckopotamus'', (Anarhynchus caeruleavultus). The ungulorns are a diverse griffon clade that diverged from other Pluvimundan birds at least 160 million years ago. They are distinguished by their claws, which have evolved into hoofed digits very similar in structure to those of both Earth ungulates and Pluvimundan jungelopes, in which all weight is born upon the distal edge of each toe which is encased in a rolled-up, keratinous nail and a softer weight-bearing pad. Today the clade comprises about one hundred and ninety known species '''divided into two major orders, the '''Jugadactyla, with two paired digits and two dewclaws on each foot, and the''' Inequadactyla', which have an odd-number of weight-bearing toes, either one or three, and a single dewclaw. The two living clades seem to have diverged from one another fairly recently, around 70 million years ago,' and today all living representatives are mostly separated onto the two major continents'. Inequadactyls live across Andromere, from Wajoderus east down onto the Servallian peninsula, while the jugadactyls are endemic to continental Aenvarna. Just one genus of '''quarbird' - a type of jugadactyl - breaks the division, having island-hopped across the Transcontinental Islands in the last ten million years and colonized the Downward Passage and eastern Uintaeus. The ungulorns, despite their very ungulate-like body plans, are birds and constrained by their hard-shelled eggs which like those of Earth birds prevent the easy evolution of live birth. '''Ungulorns, even the very biggest among them, must therefore nest, though the means by which they incubate their eggs is variable. '''The ancestral condition, retained by quarbirds and most hippogriff relatives, involves ground-nesting and setting over the eggs with the body, tucking them to either side of the torso just behind and beneath the arm pits, where a pouch of highly vascularized skin can be lain over them to keep them warm. Scarnabous and the largest inequadactyls have had to abandon this manner of incubation due to their heavy weight, and both have independently developed mound-building nesting behavior, where the eggs are laid in large, constructed piles of sand and/or rotting vegetation, warmed by the sun or the decomposition of the material within, which is attended carefully by the parent to keep the incubating eggs at the ideal temperature. Most ungulorns are proactive parents, raising their chicks for a prolonged length of time, but the scarnabous are superprecocial; adults abandon their nests once they hear the peeping of the chicks emerging from their eggs, and the young are entirely independent from birth; if the adults come across them later, they may cannibalize them. = by Sheather888 = Category:Fandom Category:Mystic